Newly developed standards, including the developing Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite-2nd Generation-Extended (DVB-S2X) standard, may allow for channel bonding to distribute a high bit rate multiplexed bit stream over multiple lower data rate transponders. For example, a 4K×2K video data stream (even encoded in accordance with the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard) may require 30-45 Mbps. This may be distributed over a plurality of lower rate channels, such as 4-6 8 Mbps transponder channels, and re-multiplexed at the receiver. Channel bonding thus allows combining multiple communications links (e.g. two or more physical links at layer 1 of the OSI model, two or more logical links at a higher layer such as the data link layer (layer 2) or packet layer (layer 3 or higher), etc.) in order to provide redundancy and/or increased throughput by splitting or striping data across the links. However, in many implementations, overhead may be required, such as timing and identification data, in order to allow the receiver to re-assemble or aggregate the original data stream. In some implementations, this overhead may be significant (e.g. 5%, 10%, or more) reducing the theoretical benefit of the bonding.
The details of various embodiments of the methods and systems are set forth in the accompanying drawings and the description below.